James' World 2

This young woman didn’t know her birth control pills could cause a blood clot in leg that would kill her. Here, Anna’s mother recounts the devastating story.

Anna Frutiger had the world by the tail in the spring of 2010. The 23-year-old Michigan native was busy working toward her longtime dream of becoming a dentist. Athletic, pretty, and smart, Frutiger had just finished her first year at dental school in Pittsburgh when the unimaginable happened. A blood clot in her lungs, called a pulmonary embolism, landed her in a hospital emergency room in mid-May. Frutiger was fighting for her life.

That day was the culmination of a health crisis four months in the making. While training for a triathlon, Frutiger began feeling pain behind her knee and calf. “Her symptoms seemed to come and go — sometimes being very painful and other times they seemed to disappear,” recalled Sara Wassenaar, DDS, Frutiger’s mother, herself a dentist in Alma, Mich. At first she believed her leg pain was muscle-related, but Frutiger told her mother it wasn’t exactly the sort of pain she experienced with other muscle pulls. She was becoming unusually short of breath as well.